How to upgrade 2010 mac pro to run PP 2014

[Tom Olsen]

I have a similar Mac Pro and I got a 512 SSD for my boot drive. I got a sled from Macsales.com that will hold an SSD but you can also use the extra SATA connector in the optical drive bay. I have a second smaller SSD instslled there that I use as a cache disk for AE and Premiere Preview files but you could use that connector to also hold a 4th internal drive too. I also installed a USB 3 PCI card and esata PCI card so I can read newer external drives faster. I upgraded the video card to a GTX 780 card- it’s not a Mac version so I lose seeing the apple during start up but it works great. You have to modify the supported cards txt file inside PP and AE but once you do those programs will use all the cuda cores on that card.

Film Editor, Avid Media Composer Editor, Adobe Premiere CC Editor, FCP 7 Editor.

[Jack Aversano]

Thank you! Got the the SSD, Video Card and more memory to start. The cache disk install tbd unless it is key to running AE as well?

[Jean-jacques Gaudel]

Hi Tom,
I too have a mid 2010 MacPro 8 core that I thought was pretty maxed out with 32GB of Ram and four 1TB hard drives, 2 of them in a RAID array using the Apple RAID card.
It worked fine for HD 3d Animation in AE. But I am getting into 4K work in 3D in After Effects CC with a bunch of layers and Ray Tracing, and my “fast” machine slowed down to a crawl.
My solution: four 480GB OWC SSD’s in a RAID 0 array in the 4 drive bays, one 480GB SSD in the second optical bay, and a NVIDIA K5000 for MAC video card to get CUDA acceleration. I also added an eSATA controler Card and put my four original 1TB hard drives in an eSata enclosure to get faster storage.
I have Mountain Lion 10.8.5 installed on both the 4 SSD RAID and on the SSD in the drive bay.
I am now getting a respectable Write Speed of 380MB/s and Read Speeds or 520MB/s on the RAID 0 using the BlackMagic Speed Test, but that is less than I was expecting. The single SSD gives me 220MB/s for both Write and Read, so I was hoping to quadruple that to about 900MB’s with the 4SSD RAID 0. I am not sure what the bottleneck is.
I tried to choose the SSD in the optical bay as my Cache in AEcc Preferences to speed things up, but it is not offered as an option. In Disk Utility, it appears on top next to the Optical Drive, and separated from the other drives by a horizontal line.

Any suggestions would be greatly appreciated. Thank you.
JJ